I have felt these memories before, when I was addicted. Always new nostalgia, always something pulling me back. Up the hill and down again, into the barn with my pants on fire – I lay in a bale of hay, the hay catches fire; man made fire, the jeering crowds fill the stadium, lightning flashed in the skies followed one second later by the celestial vivisection.

“If only we could do it again…” She stood at the top of the belltower and looked out over the red roofs of the small Belgian village. “Steal my heart,” it was a broken heart, and made of little pieces. I ran through the woods in a hurry, afraid and alone, and could not find her. I fell down at the crossroads and made a deal with God.

She found me face-down in the hay.

“My favorite holiday is Christmas,” she said. “Mine too!” Christmas makes me cry. I am a crybaby and my knees are covered in grease. A comet came down at the foot of the street and the hamlet came alive with light and majesty. I looked around for a friend but saw no one. The comet unfolded like petals and I crawled down deep inside it.

“Thank you for everything you have ever done for me, thank you for being my friend. I love you,” I did not say, because I could not do it, just like in the movies, where they do not speak, but you want them to. It is better not to speak.

We thought about space. “Imagine watching the shuttle explode,” she said, feeling morbid. “I can not imagine it.”

When she disappeared, I imagined her ghost, and took pictures of her in my mind, imagining the scenarios I could have endured, all better than the one I suffered. I put my hand through her hair and feel the tender fold of soft, warm flesh between my fingers and her bumpy skull. Our skeletons dance and bounce around and our nerve endings collide and combust.

No one thought to lock the door, though, and the miscreants crept in and watched, and grew jealous, and tried to rape us. I could not stop them bodily so I kicked one in the balls then grabbed my holstered pistol from the bedside table, chambering a round through its holster while I pointing at their chests. “Stop!” I yelled, as per my training. “Stop!”

They did not stop so I shot them, I called the police and a lawyer, and we cried. “At least it was only miscreants…”

A family of gremlins with grey bloated skin watched greedily from the branches of a nearby apple tree and break into the house in the middle of the night to take advantage of the gore and confusion. But their thin, plushy skin catches on the broken glass and is shredded from their bodies.

I listened to Nelly in a song featuring the artist Tim McGraw and it made me nostalgic for a feeling I had never had. I thought of a girl in town that I have loved for years. She does not know my name. The song reminded me of her. I have developed feelings of feelings, nostalgias of fictions I have constructed in lieu of real nostalgias. It is then just fiction, after all. We are all alike and virtual. I am bald in a vast crystal desert and I can see right through the layers of the earth to the molten core. The tall bronze champion of the river civilization led me through the forest to his secret cove, where the secret treasures sat, soaking in the lukewarm waters, full of ice and golden-flaked; we thought too hard, so hard we lost our thoughts again, and laughed together dripping-wet until the sun set, then we ran naked through the sand for the fire, by which we got drunk.

I guess you could say that was a real low point for me. That was a real low point in my life. I guess you could say that was as bas as it got. But at least I had family. And at least I was safe.

I built a sculpture but it really looked like shit. So I built another. A build a dog and I called it “Darl.” I built a torso and legs suspended in a twist, using myself as a model. I used a picture of an embarrassed girl from a pornographic photo shoot as a model for a companion piece, called “Guilt” and “Shame.” Viewed from the correct angle, they are non-pornographic. But approach from the wrong angle, and you will see my penis.

Then I built a statue of Atlas getting tired and setting down his weary burden. I called it “Burden” because I was feeling melodramatic. I sculpted a pair of hands, one wrapped around the other, and called it “Consumption.”

A plane passes overhead and I run out of the basement and into the yard to watch it. “I should plant an apple tree,” I think. “I should plant some peaches. I am glad I have a fig tree. What a small fig tree. I should start eating figs. I should make fig newtons.”

That is how you live a life. But I grew overwhelmed by the possibilities of my thoughts and stopped thinking, and I sat out of life on my own little knoll by the seashore, counting sea shells, imagining that the sails in the distant harbor were giant fins of mighty underwater monsters, dinosaurs risen deep from the undersea trenches.

But that is just imagination. I am imagining that I am capable of imagining things still. It is not even imagination, then, it is just memory. Bad, lying memory. I could have been born in a desert. I could have drifted past the reeds. No one would have missed me; in the canyon, by the water’s edge, raised by the mud people with alligator jaws; and when I rose up, strong, like Samson, and I took my donkey jawbone like a hatchet and hacked my way back to the city, I immediately wanted to go home again; “I hate the city,” I said, “The city is stupid.”

Samson went to sleep and in the middle of the night a snake assassin bit his leg and poisoned him. In the morning he had a seizure and bit his tongue off and choked on it. The citizens of the mud people nation state threw the donkey bone away in the garbage, where it belonged.